


Ignes Fatui

by lunakoroleva



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Help I haven't posted anything in over a decade, Ienzo woke up with fEeLiNgS, It was Zemyx and so is this, M/M, a little angsty but mostly fluff, if I can bring myself to post it, smut later?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 18:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17924372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunakoroleva/pseuds/lunakoroleva
Summary: Demyx's visit reminds Ienzo of time spent together as Nobodies, but this time it feels different.A collection of drabbles on Zexion and Demyx's relationship.





	1. Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

> My plan is to start at the (sort of) end, jump to the beginning, and work my way back. This may change if I get ideas.

The lab felt painfully, overwhelmingly quiet. The type of quiet where the world falls away until only one’s thoughts and heartbeat remain. 

Ienzo often found himself fixating on the steady thrum of his heartbeat in moments like these, counting the beats, considering the pauses. How it would catch, sometimes, on certain thoughts. How it raced for others. He’d spent so long without it that every new emotion still caught him by surprise, even after all the time that had passed since he first came to on the floor of this same room, his cheek pressed against cold tile and an unfamiliar, deafening roaring in his ears. 

The awkward newness of being reunited with his heart had passed in time, but he found its reactions still surprised him in moments like these. It had been a slow, steady ticking as he’d poured over his work, but it had grown to a rapid staccato when he’d been interrupted by the sound of a dark portal opening behind him and Demyx had stepped through into his lab. 

In the past, Ienzo – no, Zexion – had felt the presence of darkness and other Nobodies more than he saw them. It had been a strange but comforting way to remind himself that he was real, that there were others like him. That although he could not feel true emotions, there was some solace in the knowledge that he did not bear the curse of emptiness alone. But now Ienzo did not share Zexion’s connection to the darkness, and so it felt shockingly different to not sense Demyx before he saw him. 

A bit like reaching out with a phantom limb, he mused. Demyx had been a familiar comfort, and their connection had been as familiar to Ienzo’s Nobody as his illusions. Uncertain and cautious at first, then as much a part of him as an arm, or as his jagged blue hair. 

Demyx had felt so different standing there, but he had looked the same. Same tousled blonde hair, the same playful expression behind his bright blue eyes. Same cavalier disposition, it seemed. He’d delivered an empty replica, watched Ienzo’s heartfelt exchange with his prior mentor, and disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived. He’d made no attempt to acknowledge all that had happened since he’d last seen Ienzo’s Nobody at Castle Oblivion. Nothing to assuage Ienzo’s lingering suspicion that his memories of their time together had merely been a cruel trick of the darkness, a dream of a creature searching desperately to feel something, anything.

He’d left Ienzo alone in the lab with nothing but his racing heart and his unquiet mind to soothe him. Somehow that made the silence more deafening than before. More maddening. 

Ienzo listed forward and braced himself against the sloped edge of the counter, willing his breathing to slow Why had Demyx’s lack of interest unnerve him so much? Why had his leisurely attitude made Ienzo’s chest feel so tight?

He searched his emotions, inventorying them like he did when new lab supply shipments arrived. Excitement was there, confusion, too. Maybe loneliness and abandonment, a reminder of emotions common in his youth after his parents had orphaned him so young. But mixed among these emotions was a nameless tug that begged to follow Demyx through the dark doorway. Some sensation that had been lost to the years he’d spent growing from boy to man as a Nobody. It was hard for him, someone who craved knowledge so desperately, to admit there were gaps in his human experience by virtue of dying so young and coming into adulthood devoid of emotions. Now he was faced with moments like these, where an emotion with no name sought to rule him.

But dark doors like the one Demyx had vanished through were beyond his abilities now. Demyx, apparently still a Nobody, had gone where Ienzo could not follow. The realization that Demyx had returned to his Nobody form – willingly or unwillingly, Ienzo wasn’t sure – stung in a way he was unprepared to deal with. 

He supposed some part of him had thought their reunion would be a softer moment, a return to the easy afternoons he’d spent reading passages from the Lexicon to the sound of gently strummed sitar strings or lecturing about research until he felt his friend slump against his shoulder as he drifted off into sleep. He thought they would slip into the comfortable rhythm of stealing into each other’s rooms in the dead of night to gaze out the window and whisper tales of when they’d worn different names. But instead Demyx had walked out as quickly and breezily as he walked in, leaving Ienzo confused and wondering in his wake. 

Some part of them had always been that way – Demyx moving, Zexion reacting and reflecting his energetic comrade like a sullen mirror. 

Demyx had asked him what Zexion’s Somebody would do if he’d come across Demyx’s. He’d posed the question suddenly, when Zexion had been wrapped in careful study. Zexion had raised his lowered gaze, brushing his unruly hair out of the way to measure Demyx’s expression. Demyx looked surprised, an emotion Zexion wasn’t certain he could feel, as if he’d startled himself by asking the question.

Zexion, ever a mirror, had surprised himself into a reflection of Demyx’s expression by confessing that he couldn’t imagine their Somebodies being any different. That they would have found each other eventually. 

“Do you think you’d’ve loved me if we could feel?” Demyx had asked. Zexion noted the past tense, another reminder that his friend had been old enough to know love before he lost his heart. 

He considered it, replying after a long beat. “If my Somebody met yours now, probably.” Because how could anyone with a heart be as close as Zexion and Demyx were without being a little in love?

Probably. 

“Probably,” Demyx repeated absently, his fingers worrying at a C sitar string. A C, over and over. “Hm.”

It was very like Demyx to ask outlandish questions, and very like Zexion to answer them anyway. It was also very like Demyx to get lost in his answers. 

Demyx sat with his back pressed against Zexion’s knee, his gaze now focused against the opposite wall. Zexion adjusted his grip on his book to lean down and tangle his fingers through Demyx’s. He pulled Demyx’s hands away from his instrument with one final, fading C note.

Demyx twined their fingers together they did sometimes, pulled the book from Zexion’s lap so he could reach for Zexion’s lips and hiss him like they did sometimes. Zexion kissed him back like he did, always. 

Zexion had been and always would be Demyx’s mirror, a sullen, melancholy foil to his friend’s unbridled exuberance. But perhaps Ienzo, human as he was, couldn’t be. 

Ienzo mulled it over, hating the dull ache it left in his heart. Sadness, loneliness, loss, betrayal. Had Demyx really come and gone without so much as an explanation for why he’d returned to being a Nobody before seeking out his closest confidant from his time in the Organization?

Certainly. Time had passed. So too could Demyx’s commitment to some half-baked promise to find each other again made by two very different people when they’d reached for each other in the dark. They’d been desperate to find something that approximated emotion to carry them through the endless emptiness, something that felt natural for them in the way that breathing or channeling their powers did. 

Ienzo sighed and rubbed his eyes. Thinking rationally had been a lost easier, and a lot less painful, whe he didn’t have these emotions getting in the way. He preferred clarity, precision, freedom from ambiguity. Carefully controlled variables with predictable results. 

Demyx and the reactions he had provoked were never predictable. The emotional reaction he drew from Ienzo’s inexperienced heart were even less so. He never knew quite what to expect, so he never quite knew what to say. 

He supposed that made his relationship with Demyx the most authentic of his adult life. The schemer, unable to scheme and think two steps ahead. The schemer, vulnerable. 

He hated it. He loved it. 

He hated the ways his hands could remember the sensation of Demyx’s hair pulled between his fingers as if the blonde strands were knotted around his fingers presently. He hated how the thought kept appearing in his mind, unwelcome, unexpected, unbidden. 

He was distracted, sloppy. He had better uses for his time right now. His work helping the keyblade wielders was more pressing. More importantly, it was a problem he could actually solve. 

One final pinch to the bridge of his nose and one final, exasperated sigh, and Ienzo turned back to his work. This replica puzzle wasn’t going to figure itself out.


	2. Ink

Another memory that felt like a dream. Another moment he couldn’t pinpoint in someone else’s life. 

Darkness, inky black and wild, was spilling from his left hand. He held the wrist firmly with his right hand, as if pressure could somehow ebb the flow of black pooling in his hand. It had long since overflowed onto the ground, where it gathered around his feet like a cloud of thick black fog. 

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there like that, slowly burying himself in his own darkness. All he knew was that his back had started to hurt from sitting still for so long. 

To make matters worse, the darkness seemed to deaden sound. The inky pool cut off all sound from outside his room, so all Zexion had been able to hear was for his own slow, steady breathing. In. Out. In again. Black. 

His head snapped up when the door handle began to turn, the mechanism’s grating impossibly loud compared to the silence. Vexen, probably, here to plague him with more research questions. The man was certainly passionate about his research, but couldn’t he at least knock?

When the door opened, Zexion was surprised to find the silhouette against the bright white outside the door was not the stooped shape of Vexen, but instead the thin, willowy shape of the newest neophyte to join their ranks. He’d recognize the lazy stance anywhere. 

Number Nine. Demyx. 

“Hi, just wanted to stop by and intro-” He said energetically, pausing mid-sentence when he noticed the room was dark and Zexion was sitting on his bed, alone in the dark, black spilling from his hand and gathering at his feet. “Oh.”

Demyx’s eyes travelled between Zexion’s face, his outstretched palm, and the inky darkness on the floor. 

“Are you o-” He bega, his voice a low, conspiratorial whisper. 

“Close the door.” Zexion hissed, glancing at the hallway to see if anyone else had noticed. The hall was empty. 

Demyx hesitated, his eyes darting around the room. 

“Close. The. Door.” Zexion repeated, his voice more insistent this time. 

Demyx ducked into the room and closed the door behind him. Zexion hadn’t meant for him to close the door after coming inside, but he supposed the moment to clarify his instructions had passed. 

They remained in silence for a moment, the darkness of the room suddenly feeling oppressive. Zexion found himself without words. Demyx, too, it seemed. For once.

Zexion didn’t need them anyway. After a pregnant pause, Demyx broke the silence with “What the hell is all this bullshit?”

An unsurprising reaction, if he was honest. 

“My power.” He replied lamely. No explanation. 

“Your...power.” Demyx repeated. “And what is that exactly? Ink?” He kicked his foot through it, the darkness puffing up like a thick fog. “Fog machine?”

Zexion scoffed at the suggestion. Wrong. Probably. He wasn’t exactly sure. 

“Oh yeah? Then what is it, wise guy?”

Zexion stared at his palm, at the inky blackness that still pooled there. “I don’t know. Darkness?”

“Weird. Can you fight with it?”

“I don’t know.” He admitted. “Not now, anyway.”

“Weird.” Did he know anything but the word weird? His vocabulary seemed minimal at best. “I didn’t think ol’ Xemnas would let someone not fight. You should get me some of that. I have better things to do than the old man’s dirty work.”

Zexion didn’t answer for a moment. He hesitated before answering. “He doesn’t know.”

Demyx paused, considering. “I didn’t know that was an option.”

“It is. For me.” He didn’t feel like admitting that it was only an option because he’d lost his heart much too young to fight, and nobody had bothered to check in the years that had passed since. “My talents lie elsewhere.”

“Shit, mine too.” Demyx reached down and drew a hand through the wispy darkness. “I think it’s cool. Who all knows?”

“Just you.” Zexion admitted, drawing his legs up underneath him, resting the hand, still emitting spools of darkness, in his lap. He didn’t know why he said it, but the words came out before he could stop himself. “I can’t make it stop.”

Demyx cocked his head slightly. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

Another long pause. “Can I sit?”

Zexion did not want him to sit. But he was also a bit too polite to say no. 

Demyx had been introduced to the rest of the Organization only yesterday. He’d stood with a kind of quiet ease that made it clear he wasn’t at all intimidated by the eight cloaked strangers who stared down at him from perches high atop tall white chairs. 

Most new recruits were quietly cowed by the experience and stood mute before their new peers. A few peppered the assembled crowd with questions, figuring the large number of fully sentient Nobodies could answer the many uncertainties they’d had since losing their hearts. Nine had merely inquired as to how they’d made it up to their chairs. 

“Teleported.” Zexion had replied, chin propped primly atop his hand, the picture of disinterest. He didn’t like to do anything to encourage new recruits to seek him out after their introduction, preferring instead to sequester himself for diligent study.

And yet the new guy had shown up at his door anyway. He must be as oblivious as he seemed. 

Demyx crossed the room and plopped next to Zexion on his bed, seemingly unaware that his proximity was causing Zexion to bristle. He looked so comfortable wherever he went, Zexion noted sourly. It was infuriating. 

The blonde man was studying Zexion’s hand intently. He was young-- not much older than him, Zexion realized. 

“Does it do this a lot?” Demyx asked after a moment.

“Only when I practice.” Which was admittedly not often. Zexion hated spending time on things he wasn’t immediately good at. He had always been extraordinarily gifted at mental pursuits. Physical ones had always been harder. 

“Do you have a channel for it?” Demyx asked. “What do you think about when you summon?”

Zexion considered it. “No. And I don’t think about anything in particular. But when I try, sometimes this starts and won’t cease until I fall asleep.”

“Weird.” Demyx remarked. Zexion was starting to think they should rename him Weird. 

A flash of light, and an elaborately painted instrument appeared across the blonde’s lap. A sitar, Zexion realized. Not a guitar, as he’d originally thought. The ease with which Demyx had called his sitar yesterday had been the catalyst for Zexion’s current practice. He’d made it look so easy. How dare souch a new Nobody be so much better than him at something.

“I think about water, how it moves, how it feels against your skin. The thought just came to me.” Demyx supplied. Zexion hadn’t asked. “Et voila.”

Zexion wasn’t sure what to make of this. What had he been thinking about all afternoon? Who he was? How long he’d been there? How futile their struggle for hearts was? How he was probably doomed to face eternity this way?

The nothingness that was before him, an eternity of emptiness. 

The darkness was sloughing off of him in waves now.

Demyx took it as a cue that he was onto something. “But what drives you?” Demyx asked. “What has always been with you? What leads you to those thoughts?”

Zexion guessed that it had been music for Demyx. For him it was knowledge, the endless quest to know. The experience he’d gleaned from reading about what countless others had discovered. 

A book materialized in his hand -- an empty space suddenly occupied by a hefty, leather-bound black tome. It was open in his hands now; he snapped it closed to inspect the inscription on the cover.

Ignes Fatui. It read. Foolish fires, if he recalled his Latin correctly. Will-o’-the-wisp.

He realized with a start that the black fog that had filled the room had disappeared, leaving a startlingly white bedroom. The sounds of the castle filtered in, muted but unmistakable. The cloud had muted it all. Zexion wondered, briefly, if he’d be able to enjoy the same reprieve from the constant noise again.

Darkness looked around the room, dumbstruck. “Man,” he breathed at last. “I don’t think your power is darkness.”


	3. A Test

It was pitch black and silent as the grave. It was creepy as hell. Demyx had seen it a hundred times before, but it never ceased to unnerve him. 

He whirled, searching the seemingly unending blackness for a sign of where that blue-haired twerp was hiding.

There! A small, black-clad figure holding an almost comically large black book. He was smirking, the expression teasing. A gloved hand reached out, a finger crooked in a come-hither motion.

God, he was cocky. It was infuriating that he could wear sass so well. 

Demyx braced himself and slammed his fingers across the strings of his instrument, sending a jet of water crashing against Zexion’s slim figure. It dissolved in a tangle of inky strands, drifting back into the gloom around him.

Again.

Demyx sighed loudly. “C’mon, man. That’s getting old.”

Zexion laughed darkly from somewhere nearby, the sound quickly turning to a maniacal cackle. He was cocky and creepy. He always got like this when he thought he had his prey trapped.

He didn’t. Demyx had fought Six enough times to know Zexion couldn’t be far away. He had to be close to create full-scale illusions like that.

Zexion had underestimated him again. The problem with fighting with illusions is that it is difficult to trick someone the same way twice.

Before Zexion could arrive at the same thought, Demyx sent a wave of water around him in a circle, hoping to discover the schemer’s position. He whirled around upon hearing a quiet oof and the crumple of robes hitting the floor. The darkness winked out, leaving the white expanse of the training room in its wake. 

The sixth member of the Organization was sprawled on the floor, utterly drenched. He must have been kneeling when the water hit him -- it appeared the wave had struck him in the face.

Victory! Demyx grinned and danced over to where the smaller Nobody lay, picking himself up and wiping damp hair from his face.

He looked like an angry mop. Demyx loved it. That would show the cocky little bastard.

Demyx knelt down and extended a conciliatory hand. “That was good! You just need to come up with a new trick for next time.”

Zexion said nothing but watched him coldly, ignoring the offered hand. That was when Demyx felt a soft jab at his back.

The figure on the floor winked out of sight as Demyx turned to see Zexion -- the real one this time -- standing behind him, his pointer finger pressed into the taller man’s back. His eyes were wild, exultant. He was drunk off the sight of his new trick working. It would be annoying if he didn’t look so beautiful like that, eyes wide and shockingly bright against his pale skin, the peek of chest visible under his cloak rising and falling rapidly as he caught his breath.

“Got you.” He panted, laughter in his voice. 

Demyx’s lips were against that smirking mouth before he was able to process what he was doing. His hands gripped Zexion’s think arms, pinning them against his sides. Demyx wasn’t sure if he’d meant for this to throw his sparring partner off or if he’d kissed Zexion because he wanted to. Maybe it was a bit of both.

Zexion stood stock still, frozen in place. Demyx realized suddenly that this was probably Zexion’s first kiss. He’d lost his heart so young. Nearly a decade had passed, but he was still barely an adult. He’d spent all that time researching, not wasting time on the dalliances so many other members of the Organization were prone to. 

After a moment, Zexion melted against him with a sigh, lips breaking from their embrace only to find their way back again.

“Got you.” Demyx breathed before kissing him again.


End file.
